What Next After They Are Screwed?
As a child I remember Yetunde. One Bo'oda Mutiu went to his village and married her. After the kpatti and fanfare, the teenage bride got pregnant and we looked forward to seeing her baby. Children love to see newborns.
Yetunde gave birth, but not without going through a very difficult labour. The baby tore its way through her cervix and vagina, destroying everything on its way.
Yetunde did not get up on her own for weeks. When she eventually did, she walked with her legs spread apart and we children made fun of her. Whenever she passed to go to the bathroom, all of us would file in behind her, our tiny legs spread and mimicking her painful waddle. It took time for her to recover.
Yetunde was from the Western part of Nigeria, like many poor Yoruba girls, she never saw the four walls of a school but came to marry and carry eko and moimoi or kpako on her head up and down the streets to make ends meet. Soon, she becomes the breadwinner with several small mouths to feed. Majority of the men only had one task, to Bleep and impregnate their wives. Feeding and clothing is left for the women. He is likely going to marry several other wives and they all will be catering for their children while he donates his joystick and sperm to them when necessary.
In the mornings and in the evenings, Yetunde sends her first child to buy food from mama Lati’s gbegiri and oka shop. She gives the child hundred naira and five plates on a tray. She will buy twenty naira gbegiri for each plate. That is the breakfast for the four children and herself. Luckily, she lives in a town where there is something that looks like free education. Children are gathered like a dirty herd and dumped on the floor of a classroom and a teacher caned them through their alphabets.
Soon, her first daughter is a teenager, already sampled by a Bo’oda who is a mechanic's apprentice. And soon she is married and the horrible circle is on.
Other child brides are not as lucky as Yetude. At least her vagina healed in time to get screwed and pop out more children. In the north where I lived, if you had the heart to visit the General Hospitals, you would see things that would break your heart to smithereens.
There, you would see little girls who are suffering from VVF (Vesicovaginal Fistula) after childbirth. Tubes are connected into them to help them pass urine into a bag, because VVF causes the girls to lack the ability to pass urine on their own. They lose control over their urine passage. Some of them are not completely cured and will ever have problem with their excretory system.
And while greeting them on their beds and telling them sorry, their poor mothers who are less than 27 years old is keeping vigil by their bedside, crying. Amidst tears she would tell you that her daughter’s husband just brought a divorce letter.
It is not a joke. While these girls whose vaginas and insides were torn to pieces during childbirth were receiving treatment, using tubes to pass urine, their husband will send them divorce letters and marry another wife, another child. Some merciful husbands will not divorce the girls but simply marry other girls to replace the ones whose vaginas have been torn to pieces. The husband doesn’t want to have anything to do with a woman who is leaking urine.
There was this girl I knew who used to hawk things. Aisha was a young girl and smells. You could see flies following her. I was told that it wasn’t long she gave birth and was also a divorcee. She wasn’t well taken care of after the birth and she had VVF too. More than 800,000 women suffer VVF in Nigeria.
And I will never forget my childhood playmate, Zainab (I changed her name here). Zainab suddenly disappeared when she was about 10 years old. We stopped seeing her. We were later told that she was married.
After a year or so, I saw Zainab again. She was now a divorcee. While I was still playing in the sands and getting into one children mischief or another, my friend was already a divorcee. In fact her breasts were now as big as her mother’s and she no longer played with us. You could see this cynical, bitter and wise look on her face. She now joined her mother to sell rice and beans under a tree and now played with men.
If anyone told you that there was an advantage in marrying children. It is a blatant lie. It is besieged with a hoard of problems, from sexual to health and societal underdevelopment.
My classmate once told me a story of what happened to her neighbour’s daughter who was given away in marriage at a very tender age. She refused to face her husband’s joystick. The parents had to bring her home, invite her husband and then held her down, tied her up on their bed and sent in her husband To Molest her. The parents gave him cold fura after each round. The girl screamed throughout the ordeal.
One vital question you need to ask is why this child marriage of a thing is encouraged only among the poor folks. How many of these prominent northerners we know give their daughters away at 13 or 14? Though these men marry teenagers too but they send their daughters to school and allow them to make their own choices in marriage.
Our president married his wife when she was still a teenager but his daughter, Zara, is now in her 20s, well-educated and is not a prostitute. She is allowed to make her own mistakes in life and correct them. I am sure she will marry a man of her choice when the time comes.
Same goes for the Emir of Kano. He just acquired for his royal self a teenage wife, but his daughters are allowed to grow into adulthood. Same also goes for the King of Saudi Arabia. His daughter is one of the outstanding women in Saudi who travels the world promoting Islamic foundations. She is fashionable and a confident woman in her mid-20s.
But what about other millions of common folks' daughters whose future are truncated?
Leave the children alone. They are no sheath for your useless joystick. Or a fodder for your perversion.